Yesterday was my 4-year anniversary party for the business (which went great!), and I ended up bringing home a bunch of food and soda.
I’m not normally a cola drinker, but I had about 2/3 bottle of cherry vanilla pepsi that was so yummy that I ended up drinking the whole thing late afternoon and well into the evening.
Needless to say my caffeine-sensitive system never shut down, lol. Completely wired and on a massive creative streak, I stayed up all night designing these new silhouette art pieces of Fergie. (At about 6:30 am I finally got a few hours of shuteye).
In retrospect I am happy I drank the pepsi because I don’t know that I would have ever had time to do these without sacrificing a night of sleep, or that they would have even come out of my brain as organically as they did. I am in love with these art pieces!
Here was my process, broken down.
I loved this photograph the moment I saw it, and loved the graphic quality of Fergie’s shadow on the ground. I wanted to do more with it so I originally designed a custom shape with just the shadow (not shown but below is the photo that inspired all of the art pieces in this post). I cannot express how much I love really graphic vector art, so that is where my head was at with this photo.
I felt the custom shape I designed was lacking, so decided to try it with her in the shot as well, which is what you see here below. I like it quite a bit but wanted to experiment with other photos to get more of a true silhouette of Fergie.
After having a heckuva time finding profile images of her that would work as a silhouette, I found an appropriate image and designed this next piece. I love fleur-de-lis which is what her collar and name were inspired by. I originally tried to incorporate jacquard into Fergie but it didn’t work. I may experiment more with that because I love jacquard too. Note the name on this one. 
After I finished the fleur-de-lis piece I realized I had the beginnings of what could be a really cool Christmas card. So I designed the antlers and bell collar custom shapes you see below. Given that I do NOT have mad skillz with the pen tool in photoshop, these took me for.ever. I finally found a great quicktime movie tutorial on using the pen tool, AFTER I had finished the custom shapes, lol. (yes, of course).
Anyway, I’m thrilled with the results, and this is what my family and friends will be getting for Christmas. I am going to get some snow white linen envelopes lined in a deep red for them to go in. I’d love it if the red were sort of a metallic red. I think I’ll make a trip to the Paper Zone.
And the last piece I designed is below. I really wanted a shot of Fergie standing, so after searching through her images for a good 45 minutes, I finally found a shot that would work. (BTW: each of the shots I used came from our recent shoot at the Olympic Sculpture Park).
I knew I wanted pink in this one as it would be just for me and pink is my favorite color. And since Fergie is a little queen/princess (depending on the day), I felt the crown was fitting. The Rodeo Drive sign and sparkly necklace finish it off. The pink dots on the ground are meant to symbolize rose petals, which I also have as custom brushes, but prefer the look of these dots more- they are more modern and fun IMO.
I am so stoked with how this turned out, so much so that I think I will be printing it to hang in this cool black baroque Ikea frame that I have had (empty) forever.
I’d like to see this shot with grass and maybe a couple of trees behind her as well (sans-crown). So many options! I’ll have to get busy designing new custom shapes!
As you can probably imagine, after spending all night working on these I got pretty good at them, so will continue to experiment with other dog’s images. Next up is a long, curly haired dog, probably wayyy above my skill level but I love a challenge!
Now, after leaving this post, one more thing. After I designed these and sat back to look at my handiwork, I realized I had designed a variation of a time-honored tradition- that of silhouette art. I recalled a Domino magazine article that I saw that had these cameo silhouette busts of people hanging on a wall, so looked for, and found the magazine late last night.
I found the article (April 2006 for those who subscribe) and at the end of the magazine there was a link to the website for the artist who does the silhouette art.
Let me just say that his work is blowing my mind wide open. He HAND-CUTS every single piece he makes. With scissors!
I can’t explain it adequately, you just have to check it out here.
His work is ASTONISHING.
So there you go- my foray into the silhouette world, which I had always just referred to as ‘custom shapes’ in my photoshop-centric brain, lol. Now I know, they are called ‘silhouettes’ and they are an art form in an of themselves.
NOTE: I don’t know that I would offer these as custom commissioned designs, it just depends on whether or not I could be consistently good enough to produce them repeatedly (especially with long-haired dogs). These were done just for me personally, and I will continue to design them for fun. If I get any good at designing them I may offer them as design options to my Decopaw art clients. We’ll see!
The next time I stay up all night loaded on caffeine and come up with new art, I promise to post it here! If I succeed with any long/curly haired dogs I’ll let you know!
